He uses one example. There are many, many other examples of countries where people have suffered greatly, a lot of it due to the ineptitude of European powers who left those countries with artificial boundaries and with economic incoherence, and who left those countries without a tradition of governance. They were left to struggle as a result of it. Many of those countries now have good governance. If we look at Ghana, for example, Ghana is a country where governance is robust, yet many of the people there are paying for the mistakes that were made in the 1960s after independence. I see nothing wrong in providing aid to people in order to enable them to survive, of course, but also in order to enable people to develop themselves economically and, of course, to enable those people then to provide for their families.

I was in Uganda two years ago. The one thing that struck me about Uganda was the sheer entrepreneurial spirit of the people. What they didn’t have was capital. Coffee was the main cash crop. They saved money from coffee in order to provide themselves with capital—they had no other way of doing it. The great thing that happened in Uganda was banking via mobile phones—people could transfer money around in a way that they couldn’t before.

For many, many people around the world, they just need a bit of help in order to prosper, and that’s why we give aid to people—in order to make sure that they can prosper in the future and that their communities can prosper in the future.